Pakistan: An angry Imran Khan, a rattled army

That Pakistan's army is clearly rattled these days was made obvious when some days ago the chiefs of its ISI and ISPR, both lieutenant generals, appeared at an unprecedented press conference to refute the allegations voiced against it by Imran Khan and his followers. 

The former prime minister, for his part, has been an unhappy man since losing power in an unprecedented vote of no-confidence brought against him in Pakistan's national assembly in April this year. 

And now the waters have turned muddier, with Imran Khan getting bullet wounds in the course of his long march to Islamabad. His supporters and the media have described the incident as an assassination attempt, though cynics have raised the question of how the man aiming the gun at Khan shot him in the foot, rather than elsewhere on his physical frame. 

Be that as it may, Khan was quick to use the incident to pounce on Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah and a serving general in the army over what he believes to have been their role in the attempt on his life. 

Khan's ire, already evident over his loss of power, now has a new dimension: he is on a collision course with the powerful army, which has made it clear that it will not take the attacks on it by Khan's Tehrik-e-Insaf lying down.

Which brings one to the issue of where all of this places the Pakistan army in these times. 

With a track record of interfering and manipulating politics in the country for decades on end, the military today is clearly groping for a way out of its embarrassment without, however, releasing its grip on the levers of power. 

In terms of history, the Pakistan army today is confronted with its second big crisis. 

In the first, where it pitted itself against the Awami League following the general elections of 1970 in what used to be a country comprising two wings separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory, it was humiliated in battlefield defeat in Bangladesh in 1971. It was a defeat which many in what remained of Pakistan thought would finally push the military into relinquishing its stranglehold on politics. 

That did not happen, for good reason. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, raised to influence by the military, gave the army free rein to go after Baloch nationalists with force and fury in 1973 and so paved the path for a return of the soldiers to centre stage. In the end, the army took Bhutto's life.

Just how negative a role the army has been playing in politics comes through its second crisis, which has Imran Khan questioning its place in the national scheme of things. 

The irony, though, is that for all the verbal firepower Imran Khan has directed at the soldiers, the fact remains that his own rise to power was made possible through manipulation by the army. 

The election which brought Khan to power was rigged to enable him to replace the Sharifs, who had by then lost their influence with GHQ and so needed to be shown the door. 

The opposition to Imran Khan's government made it a daily ritual to refer to him as a selected prime minister. In a not dissimilar manner, Khan today ridicules the Sharif coalition brought back to power by the army as an imported government.

Pakistan's political crisis has come to a pass where Imran Khan has been able to galvanise his followers in a clear campaign for the army to step away from politics and for him to get back into power. Neither looks likely to happen. The military is not in a mood, given Khan's incendiary statements about its top brass, to have him return to office. 

Given the realities of Pakistan's political history, Khan has been burning his boats. His populism, which many would like to compare to that made famous by Bhutto in the late 1960s and early 1970s, comes minus any definitive programme of socio-economic uplift for Pakistanis.

As for the army, its hold on the state remains firm. No ambitious general may have tried to seize power in recent times, but that does not suggest that it is an institution, as the Pakistani political class and its media are fond of characterising it, which will call it a day and go home. 

Pakistan's history militates against the notion of the soldiers giving politicians a free hand to administer the state. 

Beginning with the coup d'etat of October 1958, the army has systematically entrenched itself in statecraft and indeed, in the popular mindset. 

Large sections of Pakistan's population have grown accustomed to a state structure that convinces them the military is the guarantor of social and political order and so must not be disturbed.

In such circumstances, Imran Khan's movement against the army's involvement in politics, his hope that he can force the soldiers back to the barracks through rallying his supporters to his cause, are patently misplaced. 

It is the same army which, following General Ziaul Haq's death in a mysterious plane crash in August 1988, went into overdrive to ensure that Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, in their terms in prime ministerial office, did not tamper with its supervisory role over the state. The soldiers raised both to power and then jettisoned them when they began to feel uncomfortable with them.

That the military remains Pakistan's most powerful political arbiter was demonstrated with dangerous clarity when Nawaz Sharif's attempt to remove army chief Pervez Musharraf from office in 1999 ended up with Musharraf literally coming down from the sky to send Sharif out to pasture. 

That attitude persists. General Qamar Bajwa, not a happy man these days, will soon go into retirement. But whoever replaces him will not do anything that will be seen as capitulation before Imran Khan's container politics.

Pakistan's army is not happy with the anger being whipped up against it by Imran Khan's followers. But it is not in danger of losing its grip on the state. Under attack, it becomes clannish, it huddles. Which is why Imran Khan's allegations against its officers have only brought the soldiers together in much-needed unity.

Imran Khan may be working the crowds to a frenzy, but that is little guarantee that he can have the ground shift for the soldiers. Added to that is the tenuous hold on power, limited though such power is, the present ruling coalition in Islamabad has. It remains highly unpopular, at sea with a load of economic problems. The soldiers are unhappy with it inasmuch as they are outraged with Imran Khan and his band of followers.

For the foreseeable future, therefore, the army will continue to determine the course of politics in Pakistan. It would not be wide of the mark to suggest that the army remains Pakistan's largest and most influential political institution. And that despite the presence of the Tehrik-e-Insaf, Pakistan People's Party and Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz).

But yes, Imran Khan, by taking the military head-on, has certainly helped create a condition in Pakistan unprecedented in form and substance. That could be food for thought among Pakistan's intellectual circles. 

Sketch: TBS